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　　LETTER 97

　　(Fragment)

　　CHARLES LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE

　　Sept. 8th, 1802.

　　Dear Coleridge,—I thought of not writing till we had performed some of our commissions; but we have been hindered from setting about them, which yet shall be done to a tittle. We got home very pleasantly on Sunday. Mary is a good deal fatigued, and finds the difference of going to a place, and coming from it. I feel that I shall remember your mountains to the last day I live. They haunt me perpetually. I am like a man who has been falling in love unknown to himself, which he finds out when he leaves the lady. I do not remember any very strong impression while they were present; but, being gone, their mementos are shelved in my brain. We passed a very pleasant little time with the Clarksons. The Wordsworths are at Montagu's rooms, near neighbours to us. They dined with us yesterday, and I was their guide to Bartlemy Fair!

　　[In the summer of 1802 the Lambs paid a sudden visit to Coleridge at Keswick. Afterwards they went to Grasmere, although the Wordsworths were away from home; but they saw Thomas Clarkson, the philanthropist, then living at Ullswater (see the next letter). They had reached London again on September 5. Procter records that on being asked how he felt when among the lakes and mountains, Lamb replied that in order to bring down his thoughts from their almost painful elevation to the sober regions of life, he was obliged to think of the ham and beef shop near St. Martin's Lane. Lamb says that after such a holiday he finds his office work very strange. "I feel debased; but I shall soon break in my mountain spirit." The last two words were a recollection of his own poem "The Grandame"—

　　hers was else A mountain spirit….

　　This letter, the original of which is I know not where, is here, for dismal copyright reasons, very imperfectly given. Mr. Macdonald prints it apparently in full, although Mrs. Gilchrist in her memoir of Mary Lamb supplies another passage, as follows:—"Lloyd has written me a fine letter of friendship all about himself and Sophia and love and cant which I have not answered. I have not given up the idea of writing to him but it will be done very plainly and sincerely, without acrimony."

　　Lamb also says that Pi-pos (as Coleridge's second child Derwent was called) was the only one, except a beggar's brat, that he had ever wanted to steal from its parents.

　　He says also: "I was pleased to recognise your blank-verse poem (the Picture) in the Morn. Post of Monday. It reads very well, and I feel some dignity in the notion of being able to understand it better than most Southern readers."

　　Coleridge's poem "The Picture; or, The Lover's Resolution," was printed in the Morning Post for September 6. Its scenery was probably pointed out to Lamb by Coleridge at Keswick.

　　Basil Montagu, the lawyer, an old friend of Wordsworth's. It is his son

　　Edward who figures in the "Anecdote for Fathers."

　　Bartholomew Fair, held at Smithfield, continued until 1855, but its glories had been decreasing for some years.] The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb — Volume 5